Posted on 09/11/2009 4:54:52 PM PDT by xzins
Eight Years On [Mark Steyn]
No dynamic culture can stand still, so we shouldn't be surprised that fewer and fewer people, from the president down, find it harder and harder to remember quite what "the day that changed the world" was all about. Nevertheless, there is unfinished business — starting with that hole in the ground in lower Manhattan. As James Lileks says:
That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.
At Ground Zero and in that field in Pennsylvania, we broke faith with the dead. What a small number of brave civilians did on Flight 93 was magnificent. The feeble passivity of their wretched memorial — the "crescent of embrace" or whatever nancified modification is on the table this week — is a national disgrace.
It's interesting on this day to read Michael Rubin's posts on Tony Blair and Yale's cartoon cravenness. I wrote in NR the other week about the Danish Motoons:
***In the long run, the ostensibly trivial matter of some undistinguished drawings in an obscure provincial newspaper in a nation way out on the periphery of the horizon may yet prove to be more significant than a direct violent assault on the citadels of American power. September 11th was a bloody provocation that was met with a vigorous display of will: Within a few weeks al-Qaeda’s training camps were smashed to smithereens, and its patrons in Kabul had hitched up their robes and fled. The cartoon crisis was a minor, albeit murderous, affair that rippled across the globe to be met by a dismal lack of will by almost every panjandrum of western civilization, from European Union commissioners to Canada’s ghastly “human rights” regime. As the years go by, that seems the more relevant template.***
If you kill large numbers of us in our own cities, we will hit back — probably (the Spanish didn't). But the effort is great and not without cost. So the prime minister who dispatched soldiers of the Queen to Afghanistan and elsewhere cannot defend core civilizational values either in his own country or at Yale. The "international community" has decided it can live with a nuclear Iran — and no doubt the nuclear Syria and nuclear Sudan and nuclear Somalia that will one day follow.
The president of the United States congratulates himself on his fearlessness in standing up for the right of a woman to choose to wear a hijab but won't say a word about the young Muslim girls murdered by their families in America, Canada, Britain, Sweden, Germany, and around the world for choosing not to wear a hijab. As is now traditional for the observances of the anniversary, the media offer their doleful reports on American Muslims' "fears" of a "backlash" against them, even though the post-9/11 period has been an era not of Islamophobia but of weirdly insistent Islamophilia. And in our broader culture, self-loathing, trutherism, and other fin du civilisation poses run rampant, even unto the heart of the government.
9/11 was bad news if you were enjoying the good life in a jihadist training camp in the Hindu Kush. But, over the long run, it was a useful lesson in the limits of western will.
09/11 04:28 PMShare
Eight years later and we have a Kenyan Marxist President from Kenya. Great!
Oh, forget about the value of the money you’ve saved.
* years after 9-11 and we have a Moslem president. Do you suppose the Jihad has won?
I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't have been better off in the long run had that plane hit the Capitol building as planned.
I really cant say, but I don’t think so. Much depends on the action of the next few months.
I saw Steve Forbes on Covuto when he expressed that this was US socialism’s last gasp. Hope he’s correct.
All of this stuff can evaporate when the BEAST starves.
Pray.
Beck’s show played a collage of sounds and images from 9-11. It was all I could do to keep it together when I thought of the years gone by and where we have ended up.
I really wanted Fox to replay Tony Snow’s remarks at the end of his show after 9-11 (Fox News Sunday I think).
I want to find a transcript.
Yes, that thought occurs to me occasionally, too.
There was one brief moment when they were all out on the steps singing “God Bless America,” but within two weeks, the Dems started to blame the US for being attacked and converted the whole thing into a lefty political circus. It’s unreal when you look back on it.
Bambi isn’t any more Muslim than he is African American. He’s Muslim identified, though, and he has spent nearly two decades trying to be accepted as African American.
He probably doesn’t practice Islam at all, but deep down inside, he sees this as part of his persona because he hates the US and this is a way of expressing it. He’s not African American, either (he’s not a descendant of Africans sold by the Arabs and brought here against their will as slaves), but he has also worked hard to create this persona for himself, spending 20 years in Rev Wright’s hate whitey church and consciously seeking to marry somebody he regarded as authentically “African American” (which she is).
I don’t know who won. I think the jihadis believe they have won, and the Marxists believe they have won, and to some extent, both of them have, because they can coexist. But they rode in on a sociopathic horse, and I think Obama is going to flip out one of these days, buck them off and trample both of them. He wants to rule them. And we shall see what happens then.
One more reason to be a Steyn fan (as if I needed one): he has Golden Retrievers:
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/2428/26/
- Jp
I saw those. They are too cute.
My sense, learned over these past 2 decades, is that our Congress is a corrupt lot of elitists.
I cannot imagine a more unworthy group to deal with issues such as health care and war.
They aren’t deserving of the sacrifices made for them in the field on this day....much less that heroic sacrifice on flight 93.
Do I wish them dead? No.
But I surely wish them, republicans and democrats alike, out of office. If fright alone would have caused that, it would be worth considering.
I wonder if we would have rebuilt the capitol dome? It's a fair question. We haven't done squat in rebuilding the twin towers -- an act of defiance that our enemies could not deny.
No. Most of our "elite" can't define what a core civilizational value is.
The president of the United States congratulates himself on his fearlessness in standing up for the right of a woman to choose to wear a hijab but won't say a word about the young Muslim girls murdered by their families in America, Canada, Britain, Sweden, Germany, and around the world for choosing not to wear a hijab.
Nor will any of our journalists either. Nor will any of our academics. Nor will any of our political class.
Find me someone who can define what a core civilizational value is, and find me someone who is willing to speak up about the right of young muslim girls to be able to live free without being murdered by their husbands or their parents, and I'll back that person for president.
I don't care what party they are from, I'm there.
As it is, most of our "elite" only favor parental rights if it involves handing someone over to a muslim or a communist. Anyone notice that the governor of Ohio has called for the girl in Florida to be returned home?
Disgusting.
I’m not big on memorials.
Deliver Bin Ladin’s head on a pike.
Re-build the twin towers 20 stories higher.
Plant a cherry grove in the field in Pennsyvania, and be done with it.
More important is making sure it doesn’t happen again.
Thank you for saying that. I've thought it from 9/11. And more and more since, because of the politicians' weasley reactions. What if about half of Congress had been wiped out that day? Think they would have a different attitude? But we can't talk about that. It wouldn't be politically correct.
BUMP!
I’m not big on memorials.
Deliver Bin Ladin’s head on a pike.
Re-build the twin towers 20 stories higher.
Plant a cherry grove in the field in Pennsyvania, and be done with it.
More important is making sure it doesn’t happen again.
Bump.
Listen to Steyn interviewed weekly on Hugh Hewitt’s show. It’s always great.
Me too.
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